How can light be both a particle and a wave?

Question

I usually see myself as being pretty solid on my general science knowledge, but this one continues to stump me.

Light is photons, little particles that move through space… but then it’s also a wave, like the visible light portion of the electromagnetic spectrum? How can it be both? How would photons red shift over great distances? Do we just not know what light is, really?

In: 9

Answer 1

It’s less like “little particles” and more like [little packets of wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wave_packet_(no_dispersion).gif) that on the whole can exhibit some particle properties. But also retaining their wave properties like being doppler-shifted.

As far as we know, we know what it is. It’s just weird.